An Online Management System for Streamlining and Enhancing the Quality of Learning Outcomes Assessment.

Learning outcomes assessment is an effective academic quality assurance tool that enables educators to review and enhance the alignment between planned, delivered, and experienced curricula. Accurately assessing what students know and are able to do after completing a learning module is the first step to decide on the strategies to implement and the proper actions to take in order to ensure the continuous improvement of the student learning experience. Nonetheless, learning outcomes assessment processes in higher education are still facing major challenges that affect their proper and effective implementation. Hence, faculty do not usually experience noticeable improvement in the students' performance over several assessment cycles, which causes their frustration and reluctance to continue participating in the assessment process. This paper discusses the main issues that affect the implementation of the assessment process and prevent the closure of the assessment loop. It also introduces a unified assessment process and an online management system that have been developed recently to address the discussed issues. The online management system streamlines the assessment process, while providing administrators and quality assurance officers with valuable infographics and reports to effectively oversee the implementation of the assessment process. The system has been deployed at the United Arab Emirates University since fall 2018, and has been successfully used by faculty to assess the learning outcomes for more than 1000 courses each semester. Moreover, collected statistics showed that the online features provided by the system allowed faculty to continue their assessment tasks seamlessly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The impact of educational concerns and satisfaction on baccalaureate nursing students' distress and quality of life during the Covid-19 pandemic; a cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: High levels of psychological distress and poor overall quality of life (QOL) have been identified among nursing students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic necessitated improvised reconstructions of educational curriculums and restrictions in clinical placement and training at campuses, possibly reducing educational quality. OBJECTIVES: We explored whether baccalaureate nursing students' concerns and satisfaction with the educational curriculum, focusing on the conduct of clinical training, were associated with perceived psychological distress and overall QOL. METHODS: Baccalaureate nursing students (N=6088) from five Norwegian universities were invited to an internet-based, cross-sectional survey during the second wave of the pandemic. The survey included COVID-19 specific questions on health, education and clinical training, the Fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19S), The Hopkins Symptom Checklist (SCL-5) and overall QOL. Data from national surveys on satisfaction with the educational curriculum, before and during the pandemic were used for comparison. RESULTS: In total, 2605 (43%) students responded, of whom 1591 (61%) had been engaged in clinical training during the pandemic. Overall, 53% were either satisfied or fully satisfied with their educational curriculum, with the level of satisfaction being significantly lower than pre-pandemic reference values. Also, 79% were concerned or highly concerned about the educational quality. In multiple regression analyses for all students, lower levels of satisfaction and higher levels of quality concerns were associated with worse SCL-5 scores. Furthermore, satisfaction with the educational curriculum was positively associated with overall QOL. For students engaged in clinical training, only concerns about infecting others were additionally associated with psychological distress. None of the items related to clinical training were associated with overall QOL. CONCLUSION: Nursing students' educational satisfaction and quality concerns may significantly impact perceived psychological distress and overall QOL during a pandemic. However, with necessary adaptations implemented, concerns regarding the conduct of clinical training account for little of these associations.

Sustainable Program Assessment Practices: A Review of the ABET and NCAAA Computer Information Systems Accreditation Process.

Program outcome assessment is a complex process that demands careful planning and resources in order to accurately assess higher-order thinking skills. A well-defined assessment approach provides detailed insights into program weaknesses and leads to continuous improvement. Whereas a poor assessment approach does not reflect the underlying weaknesses and may result in a useless effort. Furthermore, each accreditation body may have a different recommended outcome measurement approach. As a result, academic institutions may make adhoc choices just to satisfy accreditation requirements rather than designing a sustainable measurement approach. On the other hand, the magnitude of huge tasks for satisfying multiple accreditation bodies results in fatigue and mental stress for academic staff. ABET is a well-known international program accreditation body, and NCAAA is a local accreditation body for academic programs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In this paper, we have documented that how a sustainable outcome measurement mechanism can be designed to satisfy both ABET and NCAAA requirements. The core contribution of this paper is relevant specifically for academic programs in the Kingdom striving to meet both ABET and NCAAA requirements and is also relevant for all education programs to design an appropriate program assessment approach to ensure a sustainable process to foster better learning among students.

Optimizing peer review to minimize the risk of retracting COVID-19-related literature.

Retractions of COVID-19 literature in both preprints and the peer-reviewed literature serve as a reminder that there are still challenging issues underlying the integrity of the biomedical literature. The risks to academia become larger when such retractions take place in high-ranking biomedical journals. In some cases, retractions result from unreliable or nonexistent data, an issue that could easily be avoided by having open data policies, but there have also been retractions due to oversight in peer review and editorial verification. As COVID-19 continues to affect academics and societies around the world, failures in peer review might also constitute a public health risk. The effectiveness by which COVID-19 literature is corrected, including through retractions, depends on the stringency of measures in place to detect errors and to correct erroneous literature. It also relies on the stringent implementation of open data policies.